Saturday, July 7, 2012

Eight-year-old making rapid strides in chess

Ananya Gupta is just like any other eight-year-old, who spends most of her morning in school, afternoon finishing her homework and in playing a sport in the evening. But unlike other girls of her age, she has already written herself into history by excelling in a cerebral sport, chess.

She has an outstanding Elo rating of 1431, making her the highest ranked chess girl in Mumbai among eight-year olds, second in Maharashtra, and fourth in India. The FIDE (world chess body) released the official rating list on July 1 2012 on www.fide.com.

Ananya took to the game when she was just four. “I would go to my friends’ house where we had chess classes. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to pursue it seriously,” said the student of DY Patil School.

Soon, she was being coached by South Mumbai Chess Academy’s senior trainer, G Nagesh. She is already participating in active chess tourneys across the country. “Last month, I played in the first PP Savani Fide International Rating Chess Tournament in Surat where I had defeated two rated players. I was also awarded the best in the U-8 category,” said Ananya.

Now, she is participating in the Maharashtra State U-11 Chess Championship in Nagpur. Ananya surprised the top-seed Aashna Gajaria of Mumbai, beating her in 37 moves in round three.

Chess, she says, runs in the family. “My father would also play chess during his childhood,” Ananya said. What is more, her father has never beaten her in chess, she reveals proudly. “I’m much better than him,” she chuckled, adding that aggression is in her style.“I always like to attack. Chess is a mind game. Moves are the only way to scare your opponents.”

For now, she’s eager to maintain her chess rating. “I must ensure I hold on to my rating,” said the eight-year-old.

A glittering mosaic of colored stones once decorated an ancient synagogue floor with scenes of the Biblical hero Samson getting revenge on the Philistines.

This newly excavated discovery in the ancient Jewish village of Huqoq not only depicts an unusual scene — Samson tying torches to foxes' tails in order to burn his enemies' crops — it's also remarkably high-quality, said dig archaeologist Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In a mosaic, "the smaller the cubes, the finer the work," Magness told LiveScience. "Our cubes are very small and fine."

The mosaic decorates part of a synagogue dating back to about A.D. 400 to 500. So far, Magness and her team have excavated only part of the eastern wall of the structure, so they don't yet know how big the synagogue was. But the building appears to be made of large, "beautifully cut" blocks of stone, Magness said, suggesting an expansive structure.

The mosaic, which is incomplete, depicts several scenes. In one, two female faces flank a Hebrew inscription about rewards for people who perform good deeds. In the other, Samson, of the biblical story Samson and Delilah, ties torches to pairs of foxes, an event described in the Book of Judges in both the Christian and Hebrew Bibles. As the story goes, Samson falls in love with a woman of Philistine origin, a people who ruled the city-states of Gaza, Askelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath in the ancient Middle East. The Philistines are depicted as enemies of the Israelis in the Bible.

At his wedding feast with his Philistine bride, Samson taunts the Philistine groomsmen with a riddle they cannot possibly answer. [In other words, Samson is a real schmuck.] When his bride begs Samson for the solution and passes it on to her kinsmen, he kills 30 men from Askelon in a rage. When he returns home, he finds that his bride has been given to someone else. In revenge, Samson gathers pairs of foxes and ties their tails together with torches between them. He then looses 300 of the animals on the Philistines' fields, destroying their crops. [In other words, he goes running off in a snit fit, kills 30 men for no good reason other than he's a bully who thinks he is God's Gift, then comes back home and when his wife had rightfully left him, in yet another fit of rage he kills 300 foxes while simultaneously wiping out the harvest, thereby greatly offending the Goddess (who has a special connection with canines and growing crops). Is it any wonder he was rendered powerless and blinded? What an asshole!]

It's this scene that is depicted in the mosaic. It's an "unusual" subject, Magness said, because only two other synagogues have been found that depict Samson at all, much less a fiery scene of revenge. But one of the other ancient synagogues that does depict Samson is only a few miles from the newly excavated building, Magness said.

"It suggests that, for whatever reason, Samson was popular in the local area," she said.

The synagogue would have been the only house of worship in the village, Magness said. For a village synagogue, it's very fancy, suggesting that the village was an affluent place. That's interesting, Magness said, because the area was under the rule of Byzantine Christians at the time the synagogue was in use. Usually, this is seen as a time of oppression for Jewish peoples, but it seems that the residents of this particular village were doing well.

The archaeologists uncovered the mosaic last week. A student on his first dig was carefully scraping away at the dirt with a hoe when he felt the hard surface of the mosaic. He called Magness over, and they carefully excavated, brushing away dirt to reveal a colorful female face staring back at them, exposed to the light of day for the first time in 1,500 years.

"I think that was probably by far the most exciting moment I've had as an archaeologist in my life," Magness said.

XI'AN, July 5 (Xinhua) -- Liquid inside an ancient wine vessel unearthed in Shaanxi province is considered to be the earliest wine in China's history, archaeologists told Xinhua Thursday.

The wine vessel made of bronze was unearthed in a noble's tomb of the West Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC - 771 BC) in Shigushan Mountain in Baoji city.

The liquid is likely the oldest wine discovered in China, said Liu Jun, director of Baoji Archaeology Institute, who is in charge of the project.

The vessel, one of the six discovered in the tomb, could be heard to contain a liquid when it was shaken, Liu said. However, the cover of the vessel was pretty solid and there was no appropriate tools to open it at the excavation site, so the liquid remains a mystery, he said.

During the Shang Dynasty (1600BC-1046BC), the dynasty before the Zhou Dynasty, wine became a symbol of corruption as Shang officials used to drink excessively, he said.

The people of Zhou made "prohibition devices" to put on the table to remind people to drink in moderation, he said. A 95-centimeter-long and 21-centimeter-tall "prohibition device" was unearthed with the wine vessels on June 25 in the same tomb, which is the first of this kind unearthed in Baoji, he said.

Many other bronze devices with inscriptions were unearthed on Thursday.

The excavation work is still underway at the site and more bronze devices are expected to be discovered in the next couple of days.

A photograph of one of these "prohibition devices" would be useful, don't you think? Geez! What were they - gags made out of metal? Come to think of it, we could use some of those in Washington, D.C.

The other mystery is why is the "oldest wine in China" only about 3000 years old? Surely wine was being fermented long before the Shang Dynasty! I believe wine was already already being made in the Middle East around 10,000 years ago -- I have a recollection of reading several articles many years ago that talked about the domestication and deliberate cultivation of grapes in the Lake Van region as early as 9000 BCE, and it didn't take long for the vines to make their way down the mountains in Armenia into the plains of the Middle East.

Does the article actually mean to say that the wine discovered in the tomb was the first actual wine still in liquid form discovered? That, in and of itself, is actually quite amazing, when you think about it!

Awful, horrible, and disgusting. There is no excuse of this kind of destruction - none, None, NONE! For whatever reason, the government either cannot or will not provide guards for archaeological sites. Thus, the new normal in Egypt is rampant destruction and looting of precious archaeological sites. I'm sure we're only hearing about a fraction of what is actually going on, because for reasons of their own, the new "leaders" in Egypt are doing the old Death To America bullshit and therefore, in some areas, it has become downright dangerous to travel, let alone be a reporter of news to the west.

I used to dream about visiting Egypt one day and taking a river cruise on the mighty Nile. Not anymore.

I used to have respect for Egyptians -- not the leaders, I mean, the regular people of Egypt, who seemed to be proud of their ancient heritage and, by and large, caring of it. Not anymore.

Sad. So sad. Once lost, the knowledge that is contained in situ at looted sites like El Hibeh is lost forever. It cannot ever be put back to the way it was before.

Warning: There are some shocking photographs in the article. I chose not to put any of them here. It makes me cry, this horrid descretion of a sacred place.

After the January 2011 revolution in Egypt, Professor and Archaeologist Carol Redmount of U.C. Berkeley began contacting friends and colleagues in the country to get some updates about their safety and welfare. In 2001, she and a team of archaeologists with the University had conducted excavations at the ancient site of El Hibeh about 180 miles south of Cairo, a site that evidenced occupation from Pharaonic times through the early Islamic periods. Their last season was completed in 2009, and for a variety of reasons they were not able to return. Now, there were concerns about the state of the archaeological remains at the El Hibeh site. She had been informed that there was extensive looting, and that the situation there was "very bad".

"Very bad" may have been an understatement. When she and a team finally returned to begin work at the site again in February, 2012, the scene was more than disheartening. They found hundreds of looters' pits, exposed tombs, destroyed walls, and even human remains, including remnants of dismembered mummies and strewn mummy wraps, littering the site like trash.

"The day before we were supposed to start work I received a phone call telling me that local Beni Suef security had yanked our permission to work", wrote Redmount in her Facebook account. "The upshot was that a local "gangster", whose name is known, from El Ogra, the village north of the site, had formed a sort of mafia focused on looting the site. This "criminal" is evidently a murderer who got out of prison after the revolution. His "gang" is looting the site non-stop, on a massive scale. When I returned to Cairo from our dig house........our van passed the site heading for the eastern desert highway, [and] we saw about ten men openly looting the mound and desert behind (we have pictures of some of them), with conveniently parked motorcycles nearby."

El Hibeh is not the only site in Egypt that has been subjected to looting and destruction during and since the revolution. There are a number of others. But El Hibeh is especially significant because it is one of the least disturbed sites of the Third Intermediate Period. It was built about 1070 BCE by the High Priests of Amun at Luxor/Thebes and was occupied for over 1,700 years through the Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman, Coptic, and early Islamic periods.

“The damage was so severe to the site, and so ongoing, that I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try and do something,” she told NBC in an interview . “I just felt that if I didn’t come forward, there wasn’t going to be anything left.”

And come forward she did. Her interview was aired recently on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams, and she has established a Facebook page dedicated to getting the word out about El Hibeh's plight, as well as the plight of many other sites in Egypt facing the same threat. More than 1,700 people have joined the group, where Redmount and others have also posted hundreds of photographs illustrating the destruction and news about other threatened sites in Egypt and across the Middle East.

"We started the "Save Hibeh Egypt" facebook page because we are at our wits end as to what else to do........We are posting here pictures of the site, of looting, of articles regarding this issue........We must take action to save El Hibeh and hundreds of other sites like it that have been severely damaged as a result of [only] limited police protection since January 28, 2011."

The weather here has finally broken, Thank Goddess! I was up at the crack of dawn moving the sprinkler around out front, watering very thirsty trees and shrubs (grass out front is a lost cause -- it's straw color right now, sadly).

No rain, but the humidity disappeared like - POOF! Then, while I was outside about 6:30 a.m., a breeze came up out of nowhere from the east -- off Lake Michigan! It felt like Heaven! That breeze has kept up all day, so despite yet more sun and temps in the high 80's, I hardly cracked a sweat today, except when I was lugging groceries up the hill from the Pick 'n Save three-quarters mile away. Ahhhhhh, relief! Tomorrow is supposed to be back to seasonal temperature normals, about a high of 80 degrees F! Can hardly wait! Right now it feels downright cool. Still running around in shorts and sleeveless tee, and every window in the house is throw wide open and the front door, too! I'll be able to cook tonight! I actually have an appetite back! I may even be able to sleep with a sheet on tonight, gasp! And tomorrow, it's cut the grass time; that is, the few weeds out front that have survived, and the grass out back (where I've been regularly watering since the intense monstrous killer heat wave began three weeks ago and the rain stopped more than five weeks ago). Tonight will drop into the mid-60's, great sleeping weather minus the high dew point!

This afternoon I was making the rounds of some of my favorite decorating blogs, one of which is The Shabby Nest. Every Friday Wendy (creator of The Shabby Nest, a very popular decorating blog) has a link party and other bloggers are free to link up to their own blog entries about projects, recipes, sewing, gardening, photography -- it's a pretty broad umbrella under which creativity is the common link. Sometimes I come across a game-related project, and I've posted them here. Today - another game-related project appeared, and it's gorgeous!

I am thinking that a great many of our readers here don't know much about "shabby chic," but it is a raging phenom in the world of decorating and has been for years, darlings! While I do like some of the looks -- you know, sort of down-home cottagey and put-your-feet-up comfortable, not pretensious -- I confess I have a hard time wrapping my head around the work it takes to rehab some of the old pieces of furniture that the bloggers work on (nearly all of them are women) to get it looking all new and spiffy again, and then sanding the hell of it and banging it up and doing stuff with "dark wax" (sounds rather wicked, actually) just to TRY and make it look old and worn all over again!

Anyway, I will let Suzan, the blogger at Simply Vintageous whose project this is, tell her own story. Here is a photograph of her finished project and I - JUST - LOVE - IT!

Makes me want to try my hand at a painting up a chessboard table, if I can get my hands on a suitable size end table. Now wouldn't that be a hoot! And no, darlings, I won't just glue down one of those cardboard folding chessboards on top of a table painted black and call it a day, although I may be sorely tempted to do so :)

P.S. Congratulations to us! We've passed 600,000 page views since our start at the end of April, 2007. It's hard to believe more than five years have gone by...

Thursday, July 5, 2012

India has a very ancient and rich, multi-layered history but most of it is unknown to us in the West. I'll bet just about everyone in this country (USA) knows what a mummy is, but how many know who Buddha is? King Tut? Sure - millions of us have heard about HIM! But how many of us have heard about Kali Durga? Check out this absolutely incredible and beautiful temple:

KANCHEEPURAM: Thousands of residents in the temple town of Kancheepuram were a
proud lot on Thursday as their restoration efforts along with the Archaeological
Survey of India (ASI) came to fruition with the kumbhabishekam
being performed at the 1,100-year-old Varadharaja Perumal Temple.

The
consecration ceremony began at 11am and went on till 1 pm. Hundreds of devotees
lined up for more than a kilometre on Gandhi Road, the busiest stretch in the
town. The district administration had declared public holiday on Thursday for
the kumbhabishekam.

On Wednesday, a similar kumbhabishekam and chariot
procession was held at the famous Sri Kodanda Rama temple in Madurantagam,
around 78km from Chennai. "It is a huge event in the temple town. Years of hard
work had gone into its restoration. The temple is always a pride of
Kancheepuram," said S Jeeva, a resident.

Said to be the second oldest
temple in Kancheepuram after the Ekambaranathar temple which has more than a
thousand ancient temples, the Varadharaja
Perumal temple was built by the famous Chola king Raja Raja I in 1053AD (a
year before king Raja Raja died). Later, the temple on 23 acres was expanded by
subsequent Chola kings, including Kulottunga
chola I and Vikrama chola.

Anticipating a Muslim invasion in 1688 AD,
the local chieftain sent the main image of the deity to Udayarpalayam, now part
of Trichy. It was brought back with great difficulty after the involvement of a
local preceptor who enlisted the services of general Todarmal of Vijayanagara
era. During British period, Robert Clive
visited the temple for the Garuda seva festival and presented a necklace (now
termed Clive Maharkandi) which adorns the deity during the special occasion
every year.

One of the most
famous architectural pieces in the temple is the huge chain sculpted from a
stone. There is a 100-pillared hall with sculptures depicting Ramayana and
Mahabharata, a masterpiece of Vijayanagara architecture. "There are 362
inscriptions on the walls of the temple ranging from Cholas to Vijayanagara
periods," said retired deputy superintendent of state archaeology department, K
Sridharan.

Thursday July 5, 2012

MADRID: A medieval text stolen from the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in northwest Spain last year was found in a nearby garage on Wednesday, after police arrested a handyman - fired after 25 years at the cathedral - and three members of his family.

The Codex Calixtinus, a 12th century collection of sermons and liturgical passages, vanished last July from a safe deposit box in the cathedral, the end of the ancient pilgrimage route the Camino de Santiago.

Police said they had found the elaborately illustrated manuscript, a treasured part of Spain's cultural and religious heritage, in a garage near the Galician town.

The cathedral is the reputed burial place of Saint James the Greater, one of Jesus's twelve apostles who, according to tradition, went to Spain to preach Christianity.

The facsimile edition of the Codex Calixtino or Calixtinus Codex that was displayed at the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. The original of this priceless 12th-Century book disappeared from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela a year ago in one of the country’s biggest ever art thefts.

The Codex tells the story of how the apostle's remains were transferred to Santiago de Compostela and details the various routes to the town - effectively a guide for early pilgrims.

Earlier dawn raids on properties connected to the detained former church handyman, his wife, son and another woman had led police to the discovery of at least 1.2 million euros, eight copies of the Codex and other ancient books that had also been stolen from the cathedral.

Officers also found documents and correspondence related to senior church figures and keys to various outbuildings. The cathedral's book of hours, a popular type of devotional book in the Middle Ages, was also recovered.

The main suspect, whom police have not named, is a man who was sacked after working for the cathedral as a freelance handyman and electrician for more than 25 years, police said in a statement.
He was made redundant after faking a work contract to make it look like he had permanent job, and claimed he was owed 40,000 euros for unfair dismissal, the police said. - Reuters

I love these stories about old maps. I am just fascinated by the maps themselves, the people who drew them up, and the explorers who brought back the information (or took the cartographers along for the ride!)

From BBC News3 July 2012Last updated at 20:04 ET

Rare copy of Waldseemueller's early America map found in Germany

A copy of a rare 16th century map
known as "the birth certificate of America" has been discovered in Germany.

The new copy was discovered between the pages of a
19th century book

The map, by the famous cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, is credited with
being the first to document and name the newly-discovered land of America.

It had been thought that Waldseemueller had only made four copies, but
researchers at a Munich university have now discovered a fifth version.

This new map was found in the pages of an unrelated 19th century book.

Sven Kuttner, head of old books at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University,
said: "It seems to be a second edition and this is a unique map. Until now, we
have no signs for a further map like this."

German researchers are going to make the map, printed in clear black ink on
yellowing paper, available online from 4 July, Independence Day in the US.

A much larger version is already kept in the Library of Congress in
Washington DC.

It was given to the United States as a gift by German Chancellor Angela
Merkel in 2007 to mark 500 years since the naming of America.

It is thought that Waldseemueller, a prominent 16th century map maker, used
information from accounts of early transatlantic voyages to form a picture of
America.

The boomerang shape of the continent he drew is barely recognisable as the
North and South America landmass we know today.

Waldseemueller named the new land after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci,
thinking he had been the first to discover it rather than Christopher Columbus.

Not much information available online on this beautiful set. Starting bid is $300.00. Available at Butterscotch Auction Gallery, beginning July 15, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. and running for 10 days. Online bidding available.

A CATALOGUE FOR THIS AUCTION IS AVAILABLE ONSITE STARTING JULY 12, 2012.

--IMPORTANT NOTE REGARDING LIVE AUCTIONS--

ITEMS OFFERED ARE PART OF A LIVE AUCTION AT BUTTERSCOTCH AUCTION GALLERY OFFERED IN NUMERICAL ORDER AND ARE AUCTIONED AT A RATE OF APPROXIMATELY 100 LOTS PER HOUR STARTING AT 1PM EASTERN STANDARD TIME

PLEASE NOTE LIVEAUCTIONEERS STARTING TIME AND REMAINING TIME STAMP IS NOT AN ACCURATE REFLECTION OF THE HOUR AT WHICH THE LOTS WILL BE OFFERED.

ABSENTEE BIDS LEFT ONLINE ARE NOT THE SAME AS BIDS LEFT WITH THE AUCTION HOUSE DIRECTLY. THEY ARE EXECUTED FROM A PROXY COMPUTER TERMINAL IN THE ROOM AGAINST OTHER INTERNET BIDDERS. OTHER COMPETITIVE BIDS INCLUDE BIDDERS ON THE TELEPHONE, IN THE ROOM, AND BIDS LEFT WITH AUCTIONEER. ONLINE BIDDING DOES NOT PROVIDE THE ABILITY FOR AUCTION HOUSES TO INCORPORATE LEFT BIDS FROM THE WEB AND THOSE LEFT DIRECTLY WITH THE AUCTION STAFF. THUS THE BIDS MAY BE BETWEEN ONLINE ABSENTEE BIDS AND OTHER BIDDERS.

IN THE EVENT OF A TIE BID, THE AUCTIONEER HAS SOLE DISCRETION TO AWARD THE LOT TO THE HIGH BIDDER OF HIS OR HER CHOOSING WHICH WOULD BE THE FLOOR BIDDER.

By ISTVAN DEAK

Published: June 30, 2012

WRITING some 50 years ago, Archduke Otto Hapsburg, the last pretender to the crowns of Austria and Hungary, warned that economic cooperation alone would not satisfy the peoples of Europe and that European unification could not succeed unless it was imbued with an abstract principle. Only something as mystical, he wrote, as the Holy Roman Empire could give people hope, a sense of religious renewal and combat the pernicious effects of local interest, chauvinism, xenophobia and racism.

Today’s European crisis indeed shows that great political institutions cannot be constituted solely on a rational basis or through the bureaucracy and incrementalism of Brussels. The true purpose of the European Union is to bring about peace, prosperity and equality among the diverse regions and groups. Peace has indeed prevailed on most of the Continent, but in the last few years, with prosperity endangered, continued regional inequality has become even more blatant, while radical nationalism has raised its ugly head.

Historic empires provided ideals — whether universal Christian unity or the Marxist-Leninist dogmas of the Soviet Union — in which people were able to believe, no matter how flawed the ruler and how corrupt the imperial institutions. So long as people believe in the principles, the system is likely to endure.

When Rome collapsed in the fifth century and Europe sank into a civil war, hopes centered on those who promised to recreate the Pax Romana. One was the Roman Catholic Church with its Latin ritual; the other was the Frankish prince Charlemagne, who had himself crowned emperor in 800. His realm embraced most of what is today the European Union. Charlemagne didn’t have a nationality; only under his grandsons did the first official distinction between German speakers, French speakers and Latin speakers occur.

A new attempt at Christian unity, called the Holy Roman Empire, was marked by its simultaneous partnership and rivalry with the papacy. It caused Europe’s two greatest princes to both fight and support each other. Those in Brussels could draw a lesson from Henry IV, excommunicated king of the Germans and later Holy Roman Emperor: in 1077 he stood for three days under the walls of Canossa — barefoot, hungry and dressed in a hair shirt — to beg the pardon of Pope Gregory VII.

But today, where are those formidable priests and kings whose bloody clashes and spiritual challenges created the foundation of European constitutional practices and whose antics inspired the Europeans to care? Latin-speaking teachers and students once moved as freely between universities as they do today; Erasmus of Rotterdam was friends with Sir Thomas More and the entire European intellectual establishment. The fatal break in the common European Latin culture came when the Reformation elevated the vernacular to a literary level and thus created the foundations of secular, cultural nationalism. It also led to terrible internecine wars. Later empires, like those of Napoleon, Wilhelmine Germany and czarist Russia, mainly served dynastic or national interests.

BY 1900, only two genuine multinational empires remained. One was the Ottoman, which was by then in the process of abandoning its traditional religious toleration for Turkish nationalism and even racism. The other was Austria-Hungary, home to 11 major national groups: a paradise in comparison with what it was to become. Its army had 11 official languages, and officers were obliged to address the men in up to four of them.

It wasn’t terribly efficient, but it secured an astonishing degree of loyalty. It also brought rapid economic and cultural progress to an area extending from the Swiss border to what is today western Ukraine. During World War I, Austria-Hungary fielded eight million soldiers commanded by, among others, some 25,000 Jewish reserve officers. Thirty years later, the nation-states that succeeded the empire sent most of the surviving Jewish officers to the gas chambers.

The trouble is that the European Union presently exists mainly for its elites — politicians, businessmen, professionals, academics and top students — who can cross borders with ease. It is not yet the Europe of the vast majority of people who have trouble with languages and for whom finding employment abroad is quite difficult.

Because Latin is dead, a living lingua franca will have to be chosen sooner or later. Today’s Tower of Babel in Brussels costs over a billion euros annually, as professional polyglots translate documents and speeches into the 23 official languages, from Estonian to Maltese and Irish to Slovenian.

Europeans must decide whether they are satisfied with a common market and currency, or whether they want to have common political, legal and cultural institutions. They need a great European Museum and Exhibit, many more pan-European music and film festivals, and the propagation of Europeanism in popular culture to shake off cynicism regarding the European project.

Then, perhaps, Europeans will also understand that despite all their hardships, they are still among the richest and most privileged people in the world. They might even decide that they can afford to have a few children.

A new imperial construct embracing all nations, religions and non-totalitarian ideologies might well be the only alternative to the revival of tribalism with all its tragic consequences. And it will be the sacred task of leaders to make the rest of society see this as an exalted, almost religious goal: a new European faith that belongs to no church.

Istvan Deak is an emeritus professor of history at Columbia and the author of “Beyond Nationalism” and “Essays on Hitler’s Europe.”

*******************************************************************

Source of image. No further source was given at the blog, but it sure is an interesting
read about Joan d'Arc.

Are we headed for religious tyranny dictated by the beliefs of the Radical Right in the name of "the greater good?" Goddess forbid, but that is what I think is happening now in the USA.

Instead of turning their minds toward the future and new solutions to old problems, many politicians and the people who support them want to turn us back to the 19th century. Well, things certainly seemed more clear back then -- at the cost of suppression of the rights and persecution of minorities, women, and anyone else who was not a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant property-owning male.

The description of some of the ills present today in Europe could well be taken from headlines across the USA. Our Union is suffering a dread illness. Unfortunately, trying to highjack our country to force everyone back in time to the "way we were" will not cure Her. It will only divide us more and make us more gravely ill.

Perhaps we need a new Joan of Arc - to shame us all back to our senses.

In the greater scheme of things, what does this mean? Damned if I know! I do wonder, though, afterr reading this article, whether this particle actually exists or is it just something that's being mashed together by Mother Nature as a result of our "experiments" to try and figure out the nature of matter. I mean, in the absence of killing kabillions of protons in these giant accelerators, does something like Higgs Boson really exist? And if we can imagine it, how do we know that we'll ever find all the particles out there that comprise atoms and protons and -- whatever it is that actually comprises a Higgs Boson? Won't the particles just keep getting tinier and tinier and tinier...

Physicists are more than 99 percent sure that they've found a new elementary particle that is likely the long-sought Higgs boson.

Evidence for the new particle was reported today (July 4) by scientists from the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Researchers reported they'd seen a particle weighing roughly 125 times the mass of the proton, with a level of certainty that all but seals the deal it's the Higgs boson.

"This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found," Joe Incandela, spokesperson for LHC's CMS experiment, said in a statement. "The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

The Higgs, nicknamed the "God particle" (to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name), is thought to hold the key to one of the mysteries of the universe: Why do things have mass?

Its discovery represents a major step forward in our understanding of why the universe exists as it does, with matter clumping together to form galaxies, stars, planets and us, scientists say. [Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson]

To be absolutely sure they've made a true new discovery, rather than simply seen a fluke, physicists wait for enough data so that their statistics reach a level called 5 sigma, meaning that there is only a one in 3.5 million chance the signal isn't real.

"We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV," said Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson of LHC's ATLAS experiment. (GeV stands for gigaelecton volts, a unit of mass roughly equivalent to the weight of a proton.) Gianotti presented the findings to loud applause from physicists gathered at CERN (LHC's home facility) to hear the LHC's results.

The LHC's CMS experiment saw signs of a new particle with a mass of 125.3 GeV at a certainty level of 4.9 sigma.

"As a layman I would now say, I think we have it," CERN director general Rolf Heuer said during a presentation at the Geneva, Switzerland lab reporting the results today. "Do you agree?" he asked the gathered physicists, who responded with loud applause.

The Higgs boson is the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the reigning theory of particle physics, called the Standard Model. Yet the model does not predict what its mass is, so physicists have to search through a wide territory to find it. The researchers can't yet be absolutely sure that the new particle they've found actually is the Higgs.

"The work now is to actually measure its quantum identity (all its quantum properties)," Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, who was in the audience at the LHC announcement, told LiveScience in an email. "Then we can say if it THE minimal standard model Higgs or a Higgs look-alike. We have been propelled to the future of particle physics towards the understanding of the fundamental properties of our universe in its entirety."

The LHC is the most powerful machine on Earth, capable of smashing protons together to produce huge explosions of energy that transform into new and exotic particles inside its 17-mile (27 kilometer) underground loop. Yet the Higgs boson is so rare only one out of a trillion of the collisions inside the accelerator are likely to produce it, and even then, it decays almost immediately into other particles.

"This is not a needle in a haystack — it's much worse than a needle in a haystack," said Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill.

Over the past few years, researchers have been able to exclude certain possible masses for the Higgs, narrowing the possible window for Higgs further and further. Just this week, Fermi scientists announced that data from the largest U.S. particle accelerator, the Tevatron (which shut down last year), show the Higgs, if it exists at all, must have a mass between 115 and 135 GeV.

In December 2011, the LHC teams announced their latest findings, which restricted the Higgs to a mass between115 and 130 GeV, though with less certainty than the new Tevatron results.

"This is a really special time," said Fermilab physicist Dan Green, a member of LHC's CMS experiment, said Monday (July 2). "I remember when the top [quark] was discovered 20 years ago. This is one of the most exciting weeks I've had for a very long time."

Today's findings come from the two general-purpose experiments at LHC, ATLAS and CMS. Both observed particle collisions independently and analyzed their observations separately. In fact, scientists from each team were not allowed to tell each other what they found until today, for fear their results would bias the other experiment's researchers toward looking for the same results.

Chess champ Angelina Fiszer-Tsenembis (pictured) will be spending this summer weekend sitting still and thinking very, very hard as she battles on the board against fellow young contestants in the finals of a national tournament.

Angelina, a pupil at North Walsham Infant School, earned her place in the “giga-finals” of the Delancey UK Schools’ Chess Challenge after becoming the under-sevens’ girls’ champion at the Norwich Chess Tournament in May.

She learned to play earlier this year at the after-school weekly chess club run by North Walsham Infants’ head teacher Clare Fletcher.

Angelina, seven, will be among finalists representing Norfolk at the event in Manchester. “I just can’t believe it,” she told her classmates when she announced the news in school.

The UK Chess Challenge began in 1996 and now attracts in excess of 74,000 competitors and involves more than 2,000 schools.

By SINDYA N. BHANOOPublished: June 28, 2012

Fragments of ancient pottery found in southern China turn out to date back 20,000 years, making them the world’s oldest known pottery — 2,000 to 3,000 years older than examples found in East Asia and elsewhere.

The ceramics probably consisted of simple concave vessels that were likely used for cooking food, said Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard and an author of the study, which appears in the journal Science.

“What it seems is that in China, the making of pottery started 20,000 years ago and never stopped,” he said. “The Chinese kitchen was always based on cooking and steaming; they never made, as in other parts of Asia, breads.”

The crockery, found in Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi Province, belonged to a group of mobile foragers, Dr. Bar-Yosef said. They were a hunting and gathering community; plant cultivation and agriculture probably did not arrive until about 10,000 years later.

On the other hand, plant cultivation in the Middle East arrived about 1,000 years before it did in China. Still, pottery was not used in the Middle East until much later, Dr. Bar-Yosef said.

“The kitchen of the Middle East was probably based on barbecues and pita breads,” he said. “For pita breads, you don’t have to have pottery — you can grind the seeds and mix it with water, and make it over the fire.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: June 29, 2012
An earlier version of this post described incorrectly the origins of pottery in the Middle East. Pottery was not used in the Middle East until much later than it was used in China, but Middle Eastern pottery developed more than 8,000 years ago — not “about 2,000 to 2,500 years ago.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 3, 2012, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Remnants of an Ancient Kitchen Are Found in China.

Monday, July 2, 2012

This significant discovery confirms an earlier discovery, also in China, that pushes the invention of pottery back to well BEFORE the invention of agriculture, which occurred more or less about 10,000-9500 BCE. So, what were people doing with pottery nearly 10,000 years BEFORE actual "agriculture?" Well, they were hunting and gathering, of course, darlings :) People needed something to store collected berries, grains, etc. etc. -- something more "permanent" and mouse-proof than woven baskets, for sure! They also needed something to cook stuff in - besides sticking stuff on top of a flat stone or sticks!

A team of scientists led by Dr. Xiaohong Wu of Peking University has recently dated sediment layers containing pottery fragments in Xianrendong Cave in China and found them to be approximately 20,000 years old, predating the earliest known pottery dates by about 2,000 years, and predating the advent of agriculture by about 10,000 years. The finding refutes the long-held view that pottery production coincided with the beginning of agriculture.

Pottery fragment from Xianrendong [Image courtesy of Science/AAAS]

Pottery has been considered an important invention in the evolution of human society, as ceramic containers are more effective devices for holding and storing food than other prehistoric human constructs, such as baskets and hide pouches. And unlike other devices used for collecting and storage, pottery was also useful for cooking, an important development in food processing and preparation. Prior to these latest finds, the most ancient pottery, dated to about 18,000 years ago, was also found in China and Japan. The 20,000-year-old fragments date to the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which occurred about 25,000 to 19,000 years ago. Many of these early fragments showed burn or scorch marks, possible evidence of cooking.

States Gideon Shelach of the Hebrew University in his Perspective analysis of the discovery: "The period around the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), about 25,000 to 19,000 years ago, saw the advent of a new technological array that, in addition to pottery, included in many parts of China the production of small flake tools (or microliths) and grinding slab stones. It is widely held that the artifacts produced by these new technologies enabled exploitation of a wider range of plants and animals and more efficient extraction of their nutritional elements through grinding and intensive cooking". Moreover, he adds: "The proverb “necessity is the mother of all invention” not only assumes a direct functional explanation, but also assumes that conditions of stress (caused by external forces, such as climate change, or by internal social tension) force people to change their old ways of doing things. Such assumptions are embedded in the idea that the scarcity of resources during the LGM forced people to develop better ways of collecting and processing food".[1]

In other words, the harsh conditions served as a catalyst for spurring innovation necessary for survival. Humans had to "rise to meet the occasion". So they invented pottery, among other things.
But the extensive, widespread use of pottery as typically depicted within the context of the early human agricultural societies may not have come until perhaps thousands of years after its first use 20,000 years ago. Shelach, in his Perspective, makes this point using the archaeological evidence of grinding stones as an example: ".....The archaeological data suggest that grinding stones only started to be widely used toward the end of the last glacial age, ~13,000 years ago; ceramic production on a larger scale may have commenced even later. It is thus likely that these technologies initially had a much more limited set of functions, and that their full socioeconomic potential remained dormant until ecological and social conditions provided opportunities for the realization of this potential."[1]

The evidence supporting the suggestion that use of pottery significantly predates the development of agriculture could lead to a paradigm shift in the generally accepted scenarios of human socio-economic development. But it could also mean something else -- namely, that the evolution of human socio-economic development differed in different regions of the world. [Or not -- we just haven't found evidence -- yet -- of equally old pottery fragments elsewhere. Keep looking, I think we'll all be amazed at what will eventually be uncovered as we get more sophisticated in our methodology and analysis :)]

Says Shelach: "More general issues awaiting serious consideration include, for example, whether the fact that in East Asia pottery predates agriculture by some 10 millennia, whereas in the Levant it postdates the transition to agriculture, signifies a fundamental difference in the socioeconomic development of the two regions".[1]

This research appears in the 29 June 2012 issue of Science. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
_____________________________________
[1] Shelach, Gideon, On the Invention of Pottery, Science, 29 June 2012, Vol. 336.

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I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...